Train videos! =) (Shot with Lumia 920)

My nephew is very keen on trains, vehicles, dinosaurs and stuff like that. Live dinosaurs are hard to find and despite the cold Finnish winter even mammoths aren't that common.. But I happen to live next to a train station so I figured I might shoot some exciting videos for him to view =) Thus, I took my Lumia 920 into freezing conditions (it was around -10 to -15 °C ) and took a few short clips of trains passing by/stopping. The last one that with train going full speed just about a meter away was actually quite an experience to myself too!

Overall I think the video quality is exceptional, very crisp and steady thanks to the optical image stabilization found on the device. The noisy hum of the full speed trains are quite well recorded as well. Check out the 1080p full HD videos on YouTube!

Mobile broadband vs. fiber optic connection

The past month has been very busy for me! I've got a new job as Web Designer situated in the capital city and thus I've also moved to greater Helsinki region. This is the reason for such a quiet season on my blog, sorry about that!

There's still much stuff for me to sort out around here, but finally today I got my new internet connection working. For a short period I trialed a mobile broadband, "mokkula" as we call it here. For basic web surfing it was ok, but the speeds were varying a lot and the capability to sustain multiple connections failed to impress, even despite the 4G DC (?) signal was strong all the time. I need a solid connection for average web/download use that works even if I'm playing online on Xbox.

That is why I decided to return the mokkula and found out that there is an optical fiber connection available in my apartment building. They said it's the top-notch technology, especially designed for data transfers and fast speeds. This is also the impression I had of fiber optics and a quick Speedtest.net testing gave very, very consistent speeds. Almost all tests capped steady at 10.8 Mb/s for download and 2.0 Mb/s for upload. The ping number was constantly below 10ms, which is really impressive compared to the 60-80ms I got with the mokkula!

Speedtest.net results for my new broadband (Sonera's fiber optic) internet connection.

So this was my first post from my new home =) I've got some other new gadgets I haven't tried yet - hopefully I'll manage to test and write about them soon!

The new Outlook and Skydrive

Recently Microsoft has been modernizing it's  core products in quite a fast pace. I've already talked about Windows 8, but now also Outlook.com and Skydrive.com have new, fresh and modern appearance and they're totally worth a try.

SkyDrive
 

I've used SkyDrive a lot in the past year because of the great integration with my Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone. Instead of always connecting my phone to the computer to download the images, I quite often upload them to the cloud storage straight from my phone. The SkyDrive app on WP7 is pretty neat, but now that Skydrive.com has been totally modernized, I'm very pleased to use it on my computer.

The interface is very clear, simple and fits greatly to the browser window. You can easily have side panel to show extra info, or access the settings or social media share options, etc. The new SkyDrive site uses some modern HTML techniques that enables e.g. re-arranging photos with drag-and-drop gestures and uploading photos by dragging them from your desktop to the browser window, skipping the annoying "Select files to upload" type of dialogs!

One of the few things that annoy me is the fact that you can't rotate images that are already uploaded to SkyDrive. That should be fixed since sometimes the camera doesn't get the rotation of the image right, causing many portrait images rotated into landscape pics.

Outlook.com

I haven't used Hotmail much since it's always been my secondary email, but with the re-branding (to Outlook.com) I'm considering using it more than before. First of all the web email interface is better than anything else I've tried, even Gmail seems less easy to use compared to it. You can change the interface main color, reading pane position and more very easily.

One cool thing is also an extra panel that shows social media (FB, Twitter) content from the person who's email you are reading, nice! You can also chat on Facebook (also on SkyDrive) directly from Outlook.com without need to swap back to other browser tab or window. It's the same high social media integration that I've seen on Windows Phone.

Outlook.com could have many inboxes, from 3rd party services like Gmail, but I haven't tried that yet. What I did like was the option to create aliases for my old Hotmail account. The old email, macjuhruo@hotmail.com, obviously isn't the best possible, so just with few clicks I created a juho.ruohola@outlook.com alias that automatically forwards the mails to my Hotmail-account and inbox. There's still plenty of settings and stuff I haven't tried, but overall the impression of outlook.com is very positive.

Scotland/London/Olympics 2012

I spent the last 10 days of July in the United Kingdom with my friend, first in Scotland (Glasgow with visits to Edinburgh and the highlands) and then in London. We attended a few Olympic venues too; football in Glasgow, boxing and canoe slalom in London. I really enjoyed my time and Britain truly showed us it's hospitality.

This was my first visit to the UK, but certainly not the last! There's so much left to see in London alone. Click to see photo album from the trip. There's a mix of mobile photos (Lumia 800) in there too, including all panoramas.

I also used Photosynth quite a bit for static and interactive panoramas. Here's an interactive view from inside the Glasgow Cathedral.

Quiet Summer Time on the Blog

Me and a reindeer in Lapland Finland =)

I'm sorry for the pause in my writing to this blog. It's summer time, my favorite season of all, and I have been outdoors, on vacations and in a news block so I haven't had much to write about. I hope I haven't let my few followers down! I expect this quiet time to continue as my second part of vacation begins and hopefully summer heat will finally reach Finland at some point as well!

To give you at least something fresh to look at, here's two mobile photo albums: one from my trip to Oulanka National Park in Kuusamo and the other from a lovely summer day at my home town of Rauma. All photos were taken with my Nokia Lumia 800. Sadly, the battery died at the end of the second day in the middle of the National Park. The third day, however, was rainy so there's not much you're missing except overall gray photos and not-so-jolly hikers =)

Photos from Oulanka National Park, Kuusamo, Finland
Photos from Old Rauma (UNESCO World Heritage Site), Rauma, Finland

Have a great summer time everyone!

Steve Jobs biography

I'm not a bookworm sort of guy at all. In fact, I rarely read any printed material, but the official biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was something I absolutely had to read. It took me some while to read this massive book, but it was totally worth it.

I must say the first half of the book was far more interesting than the second half. I think this is because of two things: firstly, in the beginning Steve Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and all the other legends of Silicon Valley were inventing the 21st century. It felt to me that so much more exciting stuff happened in the first decades of Apple. Second reason is that I simply remembered some of the stuff in the latter part of the book (I've been Apple user since 1991). Of course the extra details from more recent Apple history were interesting, but still, it's more about the development process of some of Apple's core products of today, rather than the birth of the characters or the tech sector as a whole.

The book didn't reveal anything extremely surprising about Jobs, I knew he was a really, REALLY difficult person. But a genius. Many mock Apple and Jobs, saying that he didn't invent anything since the technical innovations were already existing. But the book depicts well how Jobs visioned HOW the technology should be used in convenient way for the users. Perhaps the biggest news from the book for me was the bizarre diets and other obsessions Jobs had.

I am no book critic, but f you are even a bit interested in technology and IT-history, Jobs, Woz, Gates, Microsoft, Google, Apple or anything related, I think you should read this book!

Titanic - A Night to Remember

April 14th-15th 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the tragedy of Titanic. The world's most luxurious ship sank after hitting an iceberg on it's maiden voyage taking over a thousand lives to a chilling grave. Still today, the story of the "unsinkable" ship remains perhaps the most notorius in naval history. I want to commemorate the occasion as I have always been keen on history and the Titanic disaster became familiar to me after seeing James Cameron's Titanic and reading the book "A Night to Remember"by Walter Lord.

First off I want to give big credit for Cameron and his grande movie. It is a true masterpiece of motion picture. Honestly, I didn't fancy the teen love story in it as I'm not much into romantic movies. To many, just mentioning the movie brings fanatic emotions either for or against Leonardo DiCaprio. To me, the movie was much more important as a whole than just pondering if Leo is an annoying brat or not. I think the setting is perfect for a love tragedy because there was so much tragedy altogether; the plain bad luck that the ship had, the lack of lifeboats, the class distinction and so forth. Just looking at the list of survivors tell you the sad story of how badly 3rd class passengers where treated and I think all that was well told in the movie.

I like it how the movie combines historical drama, action and even some humor. Some times the mix seems to be a little too "Hollywoodish", but mostly I think Cameron handled the story with a great respect to the real events. I must recommend reading the fantastic 1955 book "A Night to Remember" by Walter Lord. It tells the story of the Titanic based on the survivors' stories and strictly based on fact. No additional drama is needed, I might add. Titanic had real-life heroes and real-life villains (or cowards to say the least) and what I really like about the movie is how well they and their deeds are represented. I did a school study about the movie and researched the backgrounds of the people in the small side roles in the movie and they are very recognizable, they even look like their real-life models!

So if you are planning on going to see the Titanic 3D version or just play it from your old DVD, read the book first! It makes the movie much more interesting and (if possible) even more tragic as you know that some of the good people in the movie were real and did their best till the very end.

I recently read how James Cameron changed the starry sky in the movie to match the actual sky on that fateful night at the place of the sinking after having a note from astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think that just shows what kind of a perfectionist Cameron was with this movie project. No regular viewer will even notice the stars have changed places, but as a gesture it's awesome.

May the story of Titanic live on, it truly is a night to remember. Safe journeys.

Image: Paramount Pictures/AP Photo

6609 games later - Halo: Reach

Wohooo! On Friday 23 March 2012 I finally reached the max rank of Inheritor in Halo: Reach, after a whopping 6609 games! =D Reward: the haunted helmet. Price: weeks and weeks of time sacrificed for the cause. Since the game has played a big role in my life for the last years I figured achieving the max rank was worth a little sparkling wine!

Becoming Inheritor doesn't actually mean I'd be among the top skilled players, not at all. If anything it only tells that I've spent ALOT of time playing the game =) I can honestly say I'm only about average+ player by my skills, perhaps party because of my playing style - I just want to rush into battle (foolishly) and have fun instead of hiding in distance and sniping the enemy players.

Reaching the end of the line is something I never believed I could achieve when I started playing the game over 1,5 years ago. But now I'm there, the journey is finished and new challenges await - not in Halo: Reach, but in Halo 4 that is coming out later this year. Looking forward to that!

Thank you Bungie and 343 Industries for the great moments I've had over the thousands and thousands of games played!

If you're interested, you can see my Halo: Reach stats page

Tracking ships, planes and satellites!

It's inspiring to live in a world where technology and the internet have revolutionized the easiness of sharing information - and made vast amount of knowledge available to everyone. There's actually so much information that quite a bunch of it is totally useless too. But even useless stuff can be cool and that's what this post is about.

Have you ever wondered where that big jet flying in the skies high above you is actually heading? It's possible to find out with Flightradar24.com! It's kind of amazing that an average Joe is able to track all the flights and see their real-time position on the map. For years, I've suspected that an intercontinental route is going just above my hometown of Rauma, and checking out Flightradar a couple of times has proven that - there's planes going from especially Japan, Dubai to USA. So, check out the site and watch the skies from a new perspective =)

  People suffering from lost sense of balance and vomiting, must be the Baltic Sea...
or Tallink Silja ferries!

But it doesn't end there! If your friends are on a ship, say, like the "Swedish ferries" going from Turku and Helsinki to Stockholm, you can stalk the exact locations of their party boat. Or, if you're about to head out to enjoy the archipelago, you just might as well check out if the big ships are going to pass you by for a nice photo shoot! Track the ships with Marinetraffic.com

And finally, you can even track the satellites orbiting the Earth! For a reasonable, satellite specific tracking you can check out www.n2yo.com. If you want to to see all of the satellites, you can check out Google Earth Blog page that utilizes the 3D map view familiar from Google Earh. It tracks 13 000 satellites! Makes you wonder how many big brothers are there, watching down upon us? =D

A (digital) rose for the ladies =)

International Women's Day was a good enough reason to grab the Wacom drawing tablet from my closet and make this simple drawing of a rose - or something resembling it. I like drawing nature related stuff because no matter how you draw it, it usually looks "correct". A still-life of a machinery doesn't allow much errors or artistic freedom.

Going wild with colors has never been my thing, but in digital art it seems much more pleasant to use vibrant colors as it is in comparison to traditional coloring pencils and such. Additionally, filling huge areas with color is so much faster and pleasant when done digitally. In this drawing I like the fresh and lively colors and their contrast. Hope the ladies like it too! ;)

Capturing everyday life and sharing it on YouTube

When looking from a multimedia perspective, one could easily say we're living in an era of YouTube. I have to admit I was sort of a late adopter to YouTube. Back then I only used it when a friend sent me some funny home video and stuff like that. Today it's totally different. If you saw a cool TV ad, heard some nice song or found out that a trailer has been released for some interesting movie, it's YouTube you turn to for help. It's like the Wikipedia of multimedia.

All modern smartphones tend to have high-definition video recording capabilities, most of the "dumbphones" and point-and-shoot cameras also sport some sort of video recording these days. The possibility to capture quality video (and to take good photos) was one of the key requirements for me when I was switching from an iPhone 3G to something new.


Nokia's Lumia 800 hasn't let me down in the tasks I have bought it for. Sure the autofocus is a bit too eager when shooting video and there are some bugs when taking photos, but otherwise I'm loving the possibility to capture everyday moments, even if they come across unexpectedly. Let it be a brother's dog going mad about digging snow or capturing the full beauty of downtown Dubai area, it's there, stored on your mind and camera's memory.

Once you've captured stuff, YouTube makes it darn easy to share. I only had a few, many years old videos on my YouTube channel before getting the Lumia, but nowadays I upload videos there every now and then. It's thanks to the user-friendly interface plus the very easy but extremely useful edit tools, which I just recently discovered. My videos might not be of spectacular quality, but things like correcting color balance conveniently on YouTube is much appreciated.

Doing little editing and fixing on your videos is easy on YouTube.

Even if you wouldn't consider yourself to be the Steven Spielberg of mobile filming, you should still join YouTube. You can be there without trying to become an internet phenomena with millions of viewers, but just to share videos privately with your family for example. It's a really nice service. Thanks Google for keeping up YouTube!

You can check out some of my random videos on my YouTube channel.

Bungie t-shirts - a nerdy fashion report

A week ago I finally received a Bungie branded t-shirt all the way from the USA! It's good quality, simplistically stylish and has a bit of kick-ass attitude. Bungie is the company behind the now much popular Halo game series. Its Myth II was one of the last games I liked to play on computer until a decade of pause from video games. Then, Bungie's Halo 3 brought me back into gaming, this time on Xbox 360.

The new shirt will join my collection of two t-shirts from Bungie that date back all the way to the late 90's, when I was in my golden nerd years, so to speak. Back then Bungie games like Marathon and Myth were my top favorites because of their great storytelling and throughout quality.

The Bungie t-shirt would've been even cooler if they had put their slogan in Latin, as they did in their old coat of arms stickies "Non facete nobis calcitrare vestrum perineum" (I love Latin stuff because I studied the language myself in high school). On the back of Marathon 2 shirt there's this hilarious, perhaps bit naughty pic of the AI controlled friendly BOB units of the Marathon games.

I got the Marathon 2 shirt with Marathon Trilogy Box set (one of the greatest product packings too, imho) and Myth II shirt along with Myth II. Sadly though those shirts are XL-sized so I haven't wore them much. The new Bungie t-shirt, however, is my size S and fits perfectly! Can't wait for the summer to arrive so I can wear the shirt with pride. I honestly think Americans produce great everyday clothes. In addition to the Bungie shirts, I've got a couple of Hawaii shirts that may be unfashionable, but excellent in quality =)

Back in mid-late 90's I actually had my first penpal/internet-friend working at Bungie, who sent me all sorts of cool Bungie collectibles and even the autograph of then-Bungie-CEO Alex Seropian. But that's another story to tell!

For a funny closing here's a pic from the days of glory:

Me (on the left) and two of my friends holding Myth products circa 1997. Notice: I also wear Chicago Bulls cap (Bungie was founded in Chicago) and the cap has a Myth stickie attached to it as well =D

PS. Sorry I didn't iron the Marathon 2 and Myth II shirts for their photoshoots!

LEGO phone camera rack

I had a boring Sunday and came up with a fun idea of using LEGOs to build a camera rack for my phone. Nokia Lumia 800 can stand vertically by itself, but for horizontal photos (e.g. photo timer for portraits) it needs some help. This simple rack is made out of LEGO Technic blocks from the Space Shuttle model and features adjustable vertical tilt and a lock system to keep the tilt.

Here's a few photos of the thing I built. I must say that LEGOs are so fun and I couldn't imagine more useful and creative toys  for anyone, from children to adults =)

Winter + Touch Screen = Ouch!

Winter has arrived in Finland and there's at least one thing that reminds me of that even when indoors: the dried out and broken skin on my hands. The damage is mostly visible on my right hand and that's because I use my phone with it.

When you use a capacitive touch screen phone, you have to use it with bare hands. And doing that in Finnish winter,  when temperatures can be below -20°C, it can be quite uncomfortable. Even slight winds make your hands freeze even faster. My hands have frozen up few times, when checking out SMS while walking downtown, or checking Facebook notifications while waiting a bus.

I have heard about gloves that actually work with capacitive screens, but I can imagine they're not so good in extreme low temperatures and it would be silly to buy separate cloves just for this purpose. So, I hope there will be some improvement/innovation in this field of smart phone usability some day in the future. =)

Long live Williams!

Yesterday I was at a concert. First one in my life. Yeah, you read it right, first =D I've been going to the movies ever since I was a kid and I love movies. I like drawing and graphical design too, so I would say I'm a visually-oriented guy but I've never been into music that much.

But once my friend asked if I was willing to go listen to movie music by John Williams in a concert Eläköön Williams! (translated. Long live Williams!) I could not refuse since I love movie soundtracks! Maybe it's because they are pompous, emotional and still entertaining without the need of vocals.

I was greatly impressed from what I heard, a totally new kind of experience for me. The sound that a 97 piece orchestra, Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, produces is magical. Just as amazing is to watch this big group of people pulling it all together, seamlessly. And the acoustics of Tampere talo were so good that you could hear even the most silent sound perfectly well all the way to the back rows.

John Williams themed concert was a perfect hit for a movie fan like me, since his music is present in many of my favourites. For instance they played music from Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and Star Wars. Next time, if they pull of a concert consisting of music by e.g. Vangelis, Hans Zimmer or James Horner, I'm 100% in! =)

Golla mobile pouch for my Lumia 800

Heya! I just bought a new Golla mobile pouch for my Nokia Lumia 800. The pouch I've been using so far is also from Golla, which I originally got for my iPhone 3G. The old pouch is still in perfect shape, but I'll spare it for the iPhone and also for leisure use of Lumia 800, such as taking it for running trips etc. (Sports Tracker seems to have more accurate GPS with Lumia than with that old iPhone, btw).

Anyway, did you know Golla actually originates from my small hometown of Rauma, Finland? =) There is a town part called Kolla  (check it out on Google Maps), where the now international company was founded. In the very distinct dialect of Rauma region, words starting with K tend to change to more exotic G. Thus I guess they came up with the name of the company.

Golla products really are good in quality and they're very stylish, imho. You should get one to protect your gadgets as well!

Season's greetings

Sending out e-Christmas cards to my friends has been a tradition of mine for something like 10 years already and the card has always contained a drawing I have made (If you're interested, there's more of my art at my homepage). This is my second year when I have used a Wacom Bamboo drawing board to make the drawing directly to a digital format. The subject of the picture this year is the old town hall of Rauma, my lovely home town.

I only wish we had this much of snow. Last year at this time we had plenty - this year: nada. But let's not let the lack of snow turn our spirits down, ok? =) I wish my blog readers a very pleasant and joyful Christmas and all the best for the coming year!

Warm wishes, - Juho

Hello from Dubai!

I returned from a short vacation in Dubai few days ago. The trip was a success since I finally got to visit Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world (on my previous trips to Dubai, it was closed).

Not going to talk much about the trip itself, but I can say that my new mobile phones, HTC Radar and Nokia Lumia 800 both with WP 7.5 were in active use. The Lumia 800 was my phone/back-up camera on the trip. The green tint is present in many of the photos taken in mixed-artificial light, but otherwise the quality of the photos is good, although in very dark they turn bit blurry. Despite some hard-time focusing, the HD 720p video in the Nokia is very impressive in quality!

HTC Radar worked as my Wi-Fi connector/poolside gadget/Angry Birds console during flights and did that job extremely well. I think it had way better battery life than the one of Lumia 800 (not sure how much the mobile network activity drained it's battery, though). When talking about pictures, HTC Radar had the color balance almost always correct + the Panorama shot mode was really a nice feature to capture some amazing landscapes in Dubai!

Check out the image albums below to see some photos from the trip. You can find the 720p HD (sample) videos shot with Nokia Lumia 800 from my YouTube account.

Dubai 2011 mobile photos taken with Nokia Lumia 800

Dubai 2011 mobile photos, taken with HTC Radar

Donated to Wikipedia

Today, for the first time, I donated a few bucks to Wikimedia Foundation. Why? Because I use the site a lot. I constantly keep on googling for things and end up reading Wikipedia about the subject - and other stuff related to it.

I understand that some, if not most of the money may not really go to the things they claim them to go. Is this a reason not to donate? I don't think so. There are always people that take more than "their fair share" in this world, but it should not stop people from doing things out of good will. In general I think people are much more selfish these days than years ago. And really, few euros won't hurt your personal economy in any way.

Personally, I like the idea that even a few cents of my donation end up being used to buy a new server for Wikipedia, a server with information I might be soon looking for. And maybe by donating we get that Jimmy Wales face off from the top of the page more quickly ;)

Donate to Wikipedia

Happy 10th Anniversary Master Chief!

Ok, I'm few days late with this, but better late than never, right? =)

Anyway, so it's been 10 years since the launch of the original Xbox from Microsoft, along with Halo, it's launch title and what one might call the console's "killer app".

I was thrilled about the original Halo since it was to be released on Mac by Bungie who had made the outstanding Marathon game trilogy (indeed, Marathon is the spiritual predecessor of Halo). I kept watching this video of the initial Halo announcement by Steve Jobs over and over again.. But then Microsoft bought Bungie to port the game for their upcoming console. It was such a sad moment and I lost interest in Halo - until the summer of 2010.

It was my little brother who introduced me to Xbox 360 and two titles in specific: Dirt 2 and Halo 3 (in multiplayer). I was so impressed about the games and the thrilling atmosphere in Halo 3 multiplayer that very soon I bought my own Xbox 360 and Halo 3 alongside it (before playing the campaign I also bought and played through the original Halo: CE and Halo 2 so I wouldn't miss anything from the story!). Later on I also got my hands on Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST.

Now, I will have the opportunity to play the original Halo completely refined to match the look of modern games. The original Halo: CE I bought and played on my Xbox 360 was already 9 years old, in 4:3 ratio and with laggy frame rate and old graphics.

So it's time for me to finally experience Halo: CE as a new game just like the others had enjoyed it 10 years ago. I also look forward on the new multiplayer map experience over Halo: Reach. See you on Xbox Live!

My gamer tag: AliquisNJ